A goal of mobile and wireless communication system operators is to provide adequate service to customers at a minimum cost. In order to provide adequate service for customers, operators sometimes must provide redundant network equipment and/or other resources to meet demand at peak usage times and/or time periods. At particular times, however, these redundant network equipment and/or resources may be unneeded to provide adequate service, and therefore may generate unnecessary operating costs. These costs can include maintenance costs, hardware and software costs for the equipment, and power, bandwidth, and other network resource consumption associated with the equipment.
Although the demand associated with network resources and/or redundant network resources may fluctuate widely during a particular time period, peak demand requirements may restrict network operators from eliminating the network resources and/or redundant resources from a network. Instead, all of the network resources may be operated, albeit with reduced utilization levels relative to network resources operating at full capacity.
The continuous use of the network resources can increase costs associated with the network resources. Because all available network resources may be needed at times, and because loads and capacity are may be distributed across available network resources, operators may be unable to deactivate network resources. Thus, operating costs associated with the network resources may be treated as fixed costs that cannot be changed.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.